Title: Morning Ritual

Author: Alice J. Foster

Disclaimer: I don't own anything except my old beat-up car.

Pairing: Jack/Kate

Rating: PG

Summary: Kate reflects during her morning ritual

This is my first Lost fanfic, so please comment… constructive criticism is appreciated.


Morning Ritual (1/1)

Eight hundred and twenty-two stones.

Just a little over two years since they crashed in this damned island.

Home, remembers Kate and the word makes her cringe as always.

Her hand moves to cover her growing stomach where her second child is currently living, protected from most evils that surround them.

Kate examines the brownish black little stone she places on the ground of her cave… her cave because she'd fallen in love with it the first time she saw it. She had shown it to no one, not even Jack.

Every morning she wakes up at 4am and she runs out of the precariously built hut she now calls home and she comes to this cave and puts down one more stone on the ground. Eight hundred and twenty-two stones now lie against the cave wall, anyone who might find them wouldn't understand their meaning.

One stone for each day. Black little stones for good, normal days… reddish stones for bad days… light colored stones for really good days.

The ugly little red stones surpass the light colored ones in count by a lot but there's not much Kate can do about it. She first started this ritual about three months after they'd crashed. Two weeks later they lost Hurley and the first red stone came… another twelve black stones followed that then a sand colored one for the first night she spent with Jack. A few more black stones, a few red ones and one or two more light colored ones marked the end of their first year on the island.

One year.

She smiles as she sees the next aquamarine stone; Aaron had found it in the sand when he had started to crawl and Claire had given it to her. Kate was six months pregnant at the time and the stone now marks the day her first child was born.

Samantha Diane Shepherd

She has her mother's eyes and her father's lips and she is the most beautiful baby on the island.

Kate's hand once again travels to her stomach, wondering if this one is going to be a boy. She hopes so. They had agreed if it was a boy, they'd name him Thomas; Jack had actually been the one to bring the name up.

It hadn't been until sometime around the fifty-fifth stone that she had told him everything and she imagined it wasn't until much later that Jack actually came to terms with it all.

Jack was more understanding than any man ought to be. She sometimes wondered if the man lacked common sense – he was all but married to a convicted felon, an outlaw who had no one to go back to in the real world, yet he trusted her enough to have two kids with her.

This morning when she woke up, his right arm and leg were draped around her so tight she wondered how she'd been able to sleep in the first place. She knows he wakes up when she crawls out of bed but he never says anything… and every morning she just runs away. It's only for a few minutes but it makes her feel free, it feeds the need deep inside her to just run and leave it all behind.

She doesn't deserve this… She probably deserved crashing on the island, being chased by a monster, dealing with the possibility of death by some mysterious disease. But not Jack, not Sam and definitely not this baby that's on its way, no she can't possibly deserve this.

Every day she just wants to run past her cave, into the Dark Territory and just keep running from everything and everyone. But she always gets back before the Same wakes up and she crawls back into bed with Jack and he just pulls her close and asks no questions. Every morning he tells her he loves her and tells her he doesn't know what he would do without her to keep him sane.

And for that one moment, she doesn't feel like running away again.